In one of the more innovative online game promotions to come down the broadband pipe, Facebook players in June were offered a peek inside a mysterious box that, they were promised, would change their lives.

Really. It said so right in the URL: www.LifeChangingBox.com.

Players were given a downloadable application and instructed in the rules of the game (which we’ll get into in a minute.) But one thing they weren’t told was who was behind the app; that information was withheld for about a month after the game’s mid-June launch.

Matt Picheny, managing director of interactive for Lowe New York, which designed the game for the mystery client, points out that the teaser version of the site contained certain clues to help users figure out the ultimate marketer behind the campaign. Visitors to that unbranded version of the site found a list of possible keywords they could input into a site search box. Some of them—“shoes”, for example—produced nothing but a shrug or head shake from the glowing box floating in space; but others, such as “LCD”, “HDTV” or “Major League Baseball”, produced transformations in the box that indicated users were a bit closer to the answer.

Picheny says Lowe worked with bloggers to get the word out about the teaser site to the online community, in advance of the official launch of the branded site on July 14. And it worked; according to his figures, Lowe racked 108 blog posts about the LifeChangingBox.com site and the Facebook game. That translates into reaching as many as 1.5 million readers before the agency pulled back the curtain to reveal the product behind the campaign.

And that product was…Sharp Electronics, and specifically its Aquos line of high-definition LCD TVs.

“It’s part of an integrated campaign for Sharp Electronics highlighting three pillars: LCD innovation, solar-energy innovation and Aquos as the official HDTV of Major League Baseball,” Picheny says, adding that the branded Web site links to current national TV spots on each of those themes.

When Sharp came to Lowe NY looking for ideas to extend these broadcast spots into the online world and make them more engaging, the agency came up with a three-pronged strategy: rich multimedia ads built on the commercials; the LifeChangingBox.com Web site; and the interactive Facebook game.

To take part in the game, users first downloaded an application from the Facebook site. The game involved 10 virtual boxes and was played in rounds. Players entered a round by using one of 24 “touches” available to them each day of the game to sign into a game round. A box then jumped randomly to one of the players signed into the round and remained with that player for the duration of the round—which lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours, again randomly determined.

If the virtual box opened while it was being held, that player won whatever prize was inside—anything from an Aquos TV to a home theater system to trips to New York to see a Yankees game and a trip to Japan. If the box didn’t open in that round, a new round began, and players had to use another touch to enter. Since there could be up to 48 rounds per day for the 33 days of the promotion, players needed to strategize their touches to maximize their chances of winning.

Picheny can’t say how many installs the Facebook app got or how many players took part in the game but insists that the overall response was “far above our success metric for the campaign.”

“We’re really pleased with the uptake on the game,” he says.

In particular, Lowe was struck by the success of the viral forward-to-a-friend component of the Facebook game. If users invited a friend to join the game and that friend then won one of the prizes, the inviting user won a duplicate prize. Duplicate prizes that were not awarded were given to charity, Picheny adds.

The game rules had to be simple enough to be conveyed easily online but also complex enough to hold the interest of the tech savvy FaceBookers Sharp and Lowe wanted to target. “We wanted to incorporate a strategy element, because the demographic we were going after on Facebook is very game-oriented,” says Picheny.

In fact, the Lowe development team originally considered building greater complexity into the Facebook LifeChangingBox game, with double or triple touches, before honing it down to its final form. “We wanted something that a gaming novice would be able to play,” Picheny points out. “But we also didn’t want to make a simple lottery or scratch-off game where you just click once and never really engage with the game. We wanted to make sure to engage people on a daily basis. We also wanted to make sure they were coming back often so that we could reach them when we did the Sharp reveal right before the Web site launch.”

Lowe was prepared to set some special rules for winning at 3 a.m. Eastern time, when it was possible no one would be online playing the game and touching the boxes. (The game was only open to North American residents.) “I figured, okay, at 4 or 5 a.m. on the East Coast it’s 1 or 2 a.m. in California, so it will be dead,” Picheny says. “But the curious thing we found was that there was never a time when there was no one touching these boxes.”

The Sharp site branding was actually revealed about a week before the game’s end on July 16. It was also laid out in some YouTube videos featuring a rapping, bug-eyed hand puppet driving viewers to the game site in its final week. Created by one of the principals at social marketing firm Abraham Harrison LLC, these four very low-tech videos were posted both to the Life Changing Box Facebook page and to YouTube, where they each drew about 20,000 views.

After the Facebook campaign concluded, the new LIfeChangingBox Web site took over from the teaser site. The new site still includes some strong interactive elements that tie into those three campaign pillars of baseball, LCD technology and solar power.

For example, visitors can load one of five quirky objects into an online pitching machine and see an amazingly detailed view of the explosions that happen when they collide with a bat swung by a major league batter. The pictures were shot with a high-definition camera, so they give viewers a taste of what they can expect to see when watching A-Rod crush one out of the park for the Yanks on an Aquos HDTV.

Picheny says the stealth strategy of hiding the brand sponsor until the game had a chance to build some buzz worked in this case, but it may not be a tool marketers can use too often. “It’s like a surprise birthday party,” he says. “If it happens once, it can catch you by surprise, but doing it at your birthday every year gets pretty predictable.”